Paradigm leads $225M funding round for new ‘Solana killer’ L1
The funding round was completed by blockchain firm Monad Labs, which plans to develop a new layer-1 smart contract network with faster speed and lower costs than Ethereum
Crypto-focused venture capital firm Paradigm is leading a $225 million funding round for a new layer-1 blockchain network, which aims to compete with Solana and other top networks for market share.
The funding round was completed by blockchain firm Monad Labs, which plans to develop a new layer-1 smart contract network with faster speed and lower costs than Ethereum.
Monad Labs announced the funding round after two years of development, as stated by Keone Hon, the founder of Monad Labs, who said: "We've been emerging from roughly two years of development... At a time when a lot of the research community was focused on roll-ups, data availability, and other directions of scaling, Monad basically went really deep on the pure execution side."
The new L1 will be 100% compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), capable of processing up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), according to a March 14 X post by Monad.
Despite being the home of decentralized finance (DeFi), Ethereum has significant shortcomings, including notoriously high gas fees during network congestion. Monad Labs aims to address these issues with its execution-focused L1. Hon told Fortune: "We realized there was a huge need for a more performant EVM, and that in spite of this need, no one was really working on this problem."
